Chiropractic Treatments, Auto Accidents, and Fort Worth

Dallas/Fort Worth, Texas has one of the highest drunk-driving rates in the state (second only to Houston.) It’s no surprise that so many of the clients that come into Dr. Dale Sandvall’s chiropractic clinic are suffering from the aftereffects of auto accidents — Fort Worth has more such wrecks than most towns by a significant margin. Most of those patients come in for relief from some variation of whiplash.

Whiplash: Too Much Back and Forth

One of the most common types of injuries in a car crash is called ‘whiplash,’ so named because of the manner in which your head ‘whips’ back and then forward and then back again when you crash into something in front of you (or get crashed into from behind.) Whiplash injuries can be mild or serious, and are often completely mistreated by the major medical providers.

That’s because painkillers and other pharmaceuticals only cover up the problem; they do nothing to solve it. They essentially expect the body to heal itself, but the nature of a whiplash injury is such that the body cannot. Muscles repair over time, but a misaligned bone or a pressured nerve will remain misaligned or pressured until an expert does something about it.

That’s what chiropractic medicine does: relax, realign, and literally straighten out your body so that its innate healing ability can take over and do the job evolution created for it.

The Facts About Whiplash

Whiplash injuries can happen at speeds as low as five miles per hour, especially if you’re not wearing your seatbelt, and almost certainly if you’re not wearing your seatbelt and your airbag deploys.

Whiplash injuries aren’t always immediately obvious. There are a few reasons why, but the most common is that people are often willing to ‘take it easy’ after an accident. It’s not until a week or more later when they attempt to return to full-time work that they realize that they still can’t turn their head to the left without a lot of pain.

There is no correlation whatsoever between the amount to which your car is damaged and the amount to which you are damaged. The amount of force that is transferred to your head and neck during an accident is actually reduced if your car’s body is crushed, so in some cases it’s actually more likely that you’re injured if your car stood up to the hit — but that’s hardly a hard-and-fast rule, either, because there are a lot of factors that go into the question of how badly an accident will injure you.

If you’ve been in an accident in the past few weeks and are noticing any level of pain or disability in your neck or back, call Dr. Dale Sandvall today. The longer you go untreated, the greater the risk of permanent damage.